The real-time Web is emerging as new technologies enable a growing number of users to share information in multi-dimensional contexts. Sites such as Twitter™ (http://www.twitter.com, Foursquare™ (http://www.foursquare.com), and Qik™ (http://www.quik.com) are platforms for real-time blogging, message-sending, and live video broadcasting to friends and a wider global audience. Companies and individuals can receive instantaneous feedback on products and services from real-time web (RTW) sites such as Blippr™ (http://www.blippr.com). New real-time systems are emerging in the form of research projects and start-up companies, as well as established technology companies adapting to the paradigm.
The prior news recommendation approaches appear to have in common profiling the interests of users by their past and recent news consumption histories. Recommender systems must cope with the very large volume of news stories that are available and the varied tastes and preferences. Also, news is a biased form of media that is increasingly driven by the stories that are capable of selling advertising. Niche stories that may be of interest to a small portion of readers are often not communicated to the relevant users. All of this has contributed to a background of using recommender systems to help users navigate through the large number of available articles that are written and published every day based on learned profiles of users. For example Google News™ (http://news.google.com) is a topically segregated mashup of a number of feeds, with automatic ranking strategies based on user interactions (click-histories and click-throughs). It is an example of a hybrid technique for news recommendation, as it utilizes a user's search keywords from the search engine itself as a support for explicit ratings. Digg™ (http://www.digg.com) is another well-known example that allows users to rate Web pages, a by-product of which is a high overlap of selected topical news items.
An objective of the invention is automatic processing of real time information feeds so that they are more relevant to the recipient.